For nine years, Ronald Joseph Dominique drove the rural highways of southeastern Louisiana, crossing parish lines that no law enforcement agency was equipped to see across, killing twenty-three men without generating a coordinated investigative response. His victims — young, predominantly Black and Hispanic, living in the precarious margins of the bayou country's post-oil-bust poverty — were men whose disappearances the system had been built, through decades of specific policy choices, to treat as low-priority problems. The Bayou Strangler was not merely a killer. He was the product of a specific world, and that world made him possible.Maude O'Bryan's unflinching account moves between the bayou geography of the killing, the fractured lives of the men who were killed, and the institutional failures that allowed twenty-three deaths to accumulate across seven parishes and nearly a decade. From the prison rape that transformed a non-lethal sexual offender into a systematic killer, to the jurisdictional blindness that kept seven sheriff's offices from seeing the pattern in their separate filing cabinets, to the cultural machinery that erased the case from national memory, this is a book about systems as much as it is about a man.Rigorously researched and written with the narrative force of the best true crime nonfiction, The Bayou Strangler demands to be read — and demands that its lessons not be forgotten.
